Back 2 is a conference and festival focused on contemporary and modern poetry. The theme of the conference is contemporary poets' return to poets of the first half of the twentieth century: Yeats, Eliot, Pound, H.D., Carlos Williams, Moore, Zukovsky, cummings, Auden, Trakl, Benn, Rilke, Brecht, Tuwim, Leśmian, and others. We are interested in discussions of borrowings, reworkings, rejections, and disputes. Our main concern is with contemporary English, German and Polish poetry, although we will consider papers that deal with a similar phenomenon in other European languages.

The language of the conference will be English. Speakers will each have 20 minutes to deliver their papers, and there will be 10 minutes allocated for discussion of each paper.

An estimated conference fee of 100 euros will cover the cost of entry to all conference/festival events, conference materials, tea/coffee, lunches, and a reception. It will not cover the cost of accommodation. There will be a reduced conference fee for PhD students of 75 euros.

The scholarly conference will be held in conjunction with a poetry festival which will consist of readings by major English-language, German-language, and Polish-language poets.

We plan to publish a volume of selected papers.

The conference will be held in Sopot, the small fin-de-siècle spa-city adjacent to Gdańsk.